Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 23, Number 3, April 2011 is now available
at
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/t22273gu2362/.
This issue contains:
“New People in a New World”?: Defoe's Ambivalent Narratives of Emigration
Joseph F. Bartolomeo
Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, both published in 1722, have
often been read as propaganda for emigration, transportation of criminals,
and involuntary servitude. Both title characters find financial security and
social status after being transported as indentured servants, and they
eventually return to England. Each protagonist, however, makes an additional
transatlantic journey out of choice rather than necessity, which
paradoxically leads to greater risk and a more coercive atmosphere. Defoe
complicates matters further by reversing the order of these journeys in the
two novels, thus qualifying and in some respects subverting a purely
optimistic view of colonial prospects. And while both Moll and Jack clearly
distinguish themselves from African slaves, each is subject to more subtle
forms of subjugation because of the connectedness of a transatlantic world
that proves surprisingly small.
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http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/64w2q20250160177/?p=a8e55737c0ad450
887bba7a4058ebeb8&pi=0
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.3.455
Clarissa and the Hazards of the Gift
Linda Zionkowski
Most modern readings of Clarissa agree that the novel portrays a profound
change in social institutions as traditional family life is vitiated by the
increasing impetus towards capital accumulation; operating in tandem, the
system of primogeniture and the competition for wealth and status undermine
cohesion within kinship groups and in particular deny daughters their
customary share of emotional and financial resources. Clarissa's
objectification and exploitation, however, arise not from the ethos of
possessive individualism and the pursuit of self-interest, but from the
discursive system of moral obligation and gift exchange—the very practices
that supposedly establish and maintain affective relationships. In its
portrayal of the gift economy, Clarissa investigates the unstable
ideological power of donation, obligation, and reciprocity: while this
economy supports the patriarchal household and enables its adaptability to
changing material circumstances, in the hands of Clarissa herself it
eventually serves as a weapon for the destruction of that household.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.3.471
Henry Fielding Reinvents the Afterlife
Regina M. Janes
In Journey from This World to the Next (1743), his most extensive play with
fictive afterlives, Henry Fielding transforms classical models so as to
prepare the way for later popular Christian beliefs about the afterlife that
had yet to take hold. Enacting through a classical form hopes that in the
next century will be accepted as popular Christian cliché, he indicates as
he does so that his inventions might be taken to have implications for
orthodoxy. Such popular dissenting writers as Isaac Watts and Elizabeth
Singer Rowe had limned the Christian heaven in order to console the
bereaved, but Fielding, protected by a classical form, is able to press
desires still further into modern shapes. By toying inventively with
classical afterlives, modifying Plato, altering Lucian, re-conceptualizing
Ovid, he hybridizes classic conceptions and Christian anticipations.
Christian orthodoxy is not violated—the context is classical—but its sense
of possibility is stretched.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.3.495
Dutiful Daughters and Colonial Discourse in Jane West's A Gossip's Story
Angela Rehbein
In A Gossip's Story and a Legendary Tale (1796), Jane West engages with both
the contemporary ideology and the political reality of the British empire by
explicitly supporting British overseas trade while acknowledging the
precarious nature of a transatlantic empire. For West, the female body is a
potent site through which to explore colonialist ideologies. The fates of
various female characters reinforce ideas about feminine virtue and sexual
regulation shaped by British contact with the Atlantic world, thus promoting
a moral code that would come to define the empire. If young women do
represent the British subject in didactic fiction of this period, with the
father figure representing state authority, West's portrayal of these
characters in A Gossip's Story against the backdrop of British Caribbean
colonies alters our understanding of the national culture she promotes. A
Gossip's Story's overt message —the importance of filial duty—urges its
female readers not just to be good daughters, but to be good daughters of
the British empire.
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http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/7188m13x7p886326/?p=a8e55737c0ad450
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.3.519
“Women Love to Have Their Own Way”: Delusion, Volition, and “Freaks” of
Sight in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism
W.C. Harris
Without denying the conservatism of Female Quixotism on such themes as class
and nationality, this essay attends to contradictory impulses in the text
that work against retrenchment and mark this novel as relatively progressive
on matters of gender. Female Quixotism can easily be read as an indictment
of sentimental novels and their reputed deleterious effects on female
readers or, in a more progressive vein, as a counter to that attack. Tenney
addresses not simply the isolation of women who read sentimental fiction but
that of all educated women. In this essay, I read Dorcasina as a comic
figure who nonetheless registers sober truths about the affective and social
options that women faced in late eighteenth-century America. Do the
delusions of Tenney's heroine enable intentionality and permit some degree
of control over one's story? A lack of such control is precisely what early
American seduction novels obsessively and simultaneously mourned and
exhorted to the (female) reading public.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.3.541
Reviews/Comptes Rendus
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.3.569
Eighteenth Century Fiction publishes articles in both English and French on
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